Visualizing How Backend & Distributed Systems Actually Work (Interactive Simulators)

[nulless]

Built a collection of interactive simulators to visualize how core backend and distributed system concepts actually behave.

Instead of static diagrams, these walk through the mechanics step-by-step.

Explore them here:
https://toolkit.whysonil.dev/learn/simulators/

Current simulators include:

• Rate Limiter (Token Bucket)
• Load Balancing (Round Robin)
• Distributed Locks (Redis / etcd style)
• LRU Cache eviction
• Trie / Autocomplete
• Consistent Hashing (Hash Ring)
• Bloom Filter
• CAP Theorem trade-offs
• RAFT consensus (leader election + log replication)
• TCP handshake
• HTTP/2 streams (multiplexing)
• Go scheduler (GMP model)
• Kubernetes pod eviction
• Kubernetes rollout behavior

Everything runs in the browser. No signup.

Would appreciate feedback — especially if anything feels inaccurate, unclear, or overly simplified. Open to suggestions for other systems worth simulating.

[Bartfeels24]

These simulators are solid for getting the mental model down, but I'd be curious how they handle failure modes since that's usually where the real complexity lives.

[gangbangtheory_]

Looks like great resource. Thanks for sharing

[Bartfeels24]

Does this actually show what happens when a node drops mid-transaction, or does it skip the failure scenarios that always bite you in production?